Resist Nothing
From Bluetruth
Opening as every moment is the practice of true bliss.
The human body is very sensitive to pain. Stub your toe, and for a few moments you are consumed in minor agony.
Emotionally, too, pain is ever possible. Your lover betrays you, and your heart feels crushed. When you feel the agony of lost love—let alone the immense suffering of the world’s starving and dying millions—you can be wracked with sorrow.
Feeling physical and emotional pain is natural and inevitable, but uncomfortable. So you do what you can to avoid it. You can drive a nice car, isolate yourself from diseased and wretched people, and minimize rocking the boat of your intimate relationship. Your effort to avoid pain is as natural as pain itself.
Most of your life can become the effort to avoid pain, to experience pleasure, and to pretend everything is OK, even though something feels amiss. Your life can still feel incomplete, even in the midst of a fine meal with a smiling lover at the peak of health.
Even during the best of times, you may suffer a sense of lack. This dissatisfaction occurs because you are not opening. When you open fully as any moment, you are complete. Your broken arm may still ache. Your heart may still reel in response to the loss of someone you love. But if you practice opening now, then you add less self-created suffering to life’s natural fluctuation of pleasure and pain.
Feel your pleasure, or its lack, right now. If you are feeling relatively comfortable, for instance, then notice that you can feel your comfort. You are open to feeling your comfort. Your openness is what allows you to feel your comfort.
Now, your comfort has changed a bit. Your posture has shifted slightly. Your tongue or fingers may have moved. What you feel now is slightly different than what you felt a moment ago—but that you can feel at all means you are open to feeling.
Fully open, and as openness, feel. Allow your tongue to open and feel. Allow your fingers to open and feel. Feel the entire surface of your skin open to sensation. Feel your mind open to thoughts. Feel your eyes open to light. Whatever you are feeling—however painful or pleasurable—you can feel it because you are open.
Regardless of how much pain or pleasure the moment brings you, the truth is that you are openness. When you resist any aspect of the moment, when you close to an emotion, a person, or a situation, then you deny the openness you are. You create separateness and suffering—you do separateness and suffering—even though you may be sitting in a hot tub with a beautiful lover eating grapes.
Pleasure and pain come and go, and there is only so much you can do about it. To be born is to be guaranteed some amount of enjoyment, discomfort, and certain death. Simply to be alive as a body is to know both health and disease. To enjoy intimacy is to expose your heart to deep sharing as well as to the unloving moments of others. True bliss is to remain open—as you are—in the midst of all experience, both heavenly and hellish.
Regardless of how much comfort you are experiencing, you can surrender open as you are or you can knot yourself closed. If you open as you are now, a spacious and tender love abides—the openness that is feeling—even if your body aches or your lover has spurned you. If you close now, turning in on yourself in an effort to avoid exposure, then you suffer your own separative cramp, even if you are surrounded by love.
Openness is bliss, though not the giddy kind of bliss you feel when someone tickles you. When you feel anything, you are open as feeling. Openness is who you are, your most fundamental feeling of being. When you close to the moment, resisting emotions, people, or situations, then you deny your openness, and you suffer. Openness is bliss because it is most deeply who you are.
Your heart always knows the truth of openness. In every moment of your life, your heart tacitly compares the closed suffering that you are doing to the bliss of your true openness. “This moment can be deeper.” “Our love can be more full.” “My life can be more fulfilling.” Your heart knows the truth of openness and suffers the tense lie of your closure.
Chronic dissatisfaction is how you sense that you are living this lie. No matter how much pleasure or pain comes your way, dissatisfaction means you are resisting the openness of the moment, the openness who you are, the truth. When you are not open to emotions, people, and situations, then you are denying your most basic nature, the openness who you are.
Practice being openness by opening to feel. Just as you are, even though you may have habits of closure, you can always practice opening to feel. Open to feel whatever you are feeling now. Open to feel your breath moving in and out, feel the posture of your body, feel the space and motion in the room around you, feel the emotional tone of the people nearest to you. Open and feel. Open as feeling. Open to feel everything, and feel as openness itself.
In the midst of orgasm, practice opening, breathing and feeling all that you can feel, your intense pleasure, your lover, the entire room, the lives beginning and ending everywhere, and continue opening to feel everything fully without closure. In the aftermath of a car accident, practice breathing and feeling everything, your cuts and bruises, your fear, the love of those who care for you, and continue to feel open as each moment unfolds, pain and all.
Do your best to create pleasure and comfort in your life. But to live true, live open. Resist nothing. Feel everything. Breathe everyone’s pain and pleasure in and out of your heart. If you feel a lack in your life, practice living and breathing and feeling open.
Openness is truly who you are.
